Race behind walls: segregation in the prison system

The scene sparkled with shades of a veritable human rainbow. Under a picture-perfect California sky, people of all colors and backgrounds danced and laughed, smiled and listened to music.

But many of them had seen a darker place, a place where races are separated by lines so rigid, breaching them could be deadly.

“You have gangs behind the walls in prison,” said Jesse Reed, a smiling, effusive Richmond resident who spent 25 years in California prisons before his 2009 parole. “And you just can’t cell with people of other races, can’t live with them.”

Read the full story on racial segregation within California’s prison system, and see multimedia interviews with former inmates, at Richmond Confidential.